Posts tagged ‘Obama administration’

Richard Kauzlarich was among the Washington energy policy watchers surprised by the Obama administration’s 11th-hour halt to the Dakota Access oil pipeline, September 9. The contentious pipeline project reminded him of another energy era in a very different part of the world.

Congress is scheduled to vote Friday on a massive government spending package with a provision to lift all limits on crude oil exports, a potentially landmark policy change which would give US producers unfettered access to the world market for the first time in four decades.

If Bill O’Reilly, author of such books as “Killing Lincoln” and “Killing Kennedy” were to turn his attention to pipelines, his next book might be entitled “Killing Keystone.”

It would be a tale full of twists and turns, conspiracy theories, missed opportunities, miscalculations and bad timing surrounding TransCanada’s proposed Keystone XL pipeline. It would not, however, be a book about whether the now-notorious project would have been good simply on its merits.

Ever since US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz acknowledged at a Platts forum in December 2013 that the Strategic Petroleum Reserve merited a “re-look” at how it is structured, given the boom in US production and the resulting declines in imports and changes in crude flows, US officials have said they were studying the issue and would soon make recommendations on what to do about the 1970s era storage facilities.

So, last week’s much anticipated release of the Department of Energy’s Quadrennial Energy Review must have been a disappointment, then, for people who closely follow the SPR, as the report, which included a whole chapter devoted to the reserve, merely recommended … additional study.

The historic meeting Saturday between President Barack Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro during the Summit of the Americas in Panama may be a strong signal that over 50 years of trade restrictions will soon be eased, but don’t expect US oil and gas operators on or offshore the island nation anytime soon.

Early Friday evening, just hours before $85 billion in automatic federal spending cuts went into effect, the State Department released its 2,000-page draft environmental review of the Keystone XL pipeline.

Fundamentally, the pipeline and the sequester have little in common outside of the controversy and bipartisan vitriol they have attracted, but the fate of one issue may ultimately influence the other.

In theory, and I should stress that this is only a theory, the sequester could further delay the already-delayed decision to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, or at least give the Obama administration, facing staunch opposition from environmental groups, a reason to put it off.

The morning after the second US presidential debate, Republican hopeful Mitt Romney’s “binders full of women” comment is getting the lion’s share of online attention. But what is getting less attention is his attempt to use high gasoline prices to attack his Democratic opponent, President Barack Obama.

And there is a very good reason for that: voters care deeply about gasoline prices, but they are truly confused whether the president can do anything about them.

This week, a third-term congressman from Minnesota unveiled a bill that closely resembles a long line of unsuccessful legislative and budget proposals that have faced harsh opposition from the futures industry.

The bill would tax futures, swaps and other transactions and at least indirectly addresses two pressing issues on the minds of many voters this election season: the growing national deficit and the public’s apparent distaste over the financial services industry.

“It’s a tax that suits the times,” said Carl Ginsburg, a spokesman for the Robin Hood Tax Campaign, a major supporter of the bill.